Blog

The Elephant NOT in the Room: Why Safari Needs Core Web Vitals

Safari’s lack of support for industry-standard performance metrics leaves us with a gaping blind spot.

Takeaways from the SDIA Green Coding Summit 2023

Tech conferences are so important for spreading knowledge and bringing the like-minded together. And that's vital to tackle climate change.

Testing Slow Third-Parties with Puppeteer

Run single-point-of-failure (SPOF) tests using Puppeteer to see what happens to web page rendering and interactivity when third-party stylesheets and scripts are laggy

About Sifty

Filter and search network requests in WebPageTest and Google Lighthouse JSON files

The Page Speed Hackathon

Seeding a performance culture in a large organization by gamifying cross-discipline teamwork

Experiment with Priority Hints Locally

Use Chrome Local Overrides to see how you could influence the order of resource downloads

How to Reduce the Carbon Cost of Video Conferencing: A Concept

Some crafty UX and performance optimization could help reduce bytes transferred and energy used by video calls

Using The WebPageTest API with Python

Run custom, scripted and batch tests with the ease and stealth of Python.

Sustainable UX

The internet is the biggest machine that humans have ever built. And it's hungry for energy.

WebPageTest Sorcery Using Google Sheets

How to pull JSON from the Web and work with it directly in Google Sheets

Compare your site speed with competitors' using the CrUX API

Send batch requests to the Chrome UX Report API for Web Vitals using Python and compare the numbers in a spreadsheet

Sustainable UX Podcast — REWE Digital

Using Chrome Local Overrides To Optimize Page Speed

How to test ideas for making web pages faster and measure their potential impact – without a single deployment

Cookie Banners and Web Vitals

Is your cookie banner punching you in the Web Vitals? 🥊 Then stop treating it like critical content.

Performant Placeholders

Why use placeholder images? How can you load them quickly? How do they affect Largest Contentful Paint? An analysis.

Green by Default

This simple psychological trick could vastly reduce tech's carbon footprint.

How Search Engines Could Help Us Surf More Safely and Sustainably – a Concept

If you knew beforehand how much a website costs in terms of time, money, privacy and the environment – would you still visit it?

Link List: Green UX and Digital Sustainability

What can we as experience designers do to minimize the environmental impact of our work? Here are some resources to learn all you need to get started.

Using Python to Read Multiple JSON Files and Export Values to a CSV

Comparing data from multiple JSON files can get unweildy – unless you leverage Python to give you the data you need.

Do I Need a CDN for My Personal Website?

I shaved a whole second off page load times by hosting my personal website on a CDN. But now I'm not sure how energy-efficient it is.

Book Review: 'World Wide Waste' by Gerry McGovern

Websites, the Cloud, the Internet. They sound harmlessly non-physical; but digital communications, devices and lifestyle choices gobble up real resources. Gerry McGovern makes the case for why we need to curb our digital addiction before we drag our planet into the trash bin.

The Field of UX Design by 2030

Imagine ringing in the year 2030 and the world as we know it has not yet ended. How might we look back upon the role of UX design in the 2020s?

How GDPR and ePrivacy Will Make the Web Faster and More Sustainable. Sorta.

The Web is about to get a whole lot more secure, faster – and more sustainable. At least in Europe.

Testing a Website from Different Locations Using WebPagetest? Watch Out for This

Strangly, my website seemed to render faster outside of the country it's hosted.

Book Review: 'Ruined by Design' by Mike Monteiro

Us designers are more than pixel-pushers. We are the gatekeepers. Monteiro's book is a manifesto for design advocacy and ethics.

3 Reasons to Kill 3rd-Party Trackers on Your Site RIGHT NOW

For decades, marketers have tracked user behavior online. But that data-gorging is coming to an end. Remove 3rd-party marketing tags from your site TODAY to better protect user data and improve page loading times.

What Sailing Taught Me About being a Team Captain

In this article, I cover some of the problems I faced while getting my sailing/motorboat license and draw parallels between that experience and my day-to-day work as a “captain” of a creative team.

Do I Need the Latest Geeky Gadget When I Work in UX/UI?

Can I be a credible UX/UI professional without rushing out to buy the latest phone – essentially biting the hand that feeds me?

WhatsApp Tab Bar Concept

I am not the only one who finds the WhatsApp tab bar in iOS confusing. Here are a couple of ideas of how to improve it.

Getting a Perfect 100 Google Lighthouse Score On Your Personal Site (Part II)

How I handled CSS, JS, images, compression and caching on my Eleventy-based site

Getting a Perfect 100 Google Lighthouse Score On Your Personal Site (Part I)

Wordpress vs. Static Site Generators – Which is Faster ⚡️for Personal Sites?

My Toolbox

These are the tools I use on a daily basis.

How to Build a Website Speed Monitor for Free Using Webpagetest, Google Lighthouse, InfluxDB and Grafana

Test and monitor webpage performance how, when and where you want – for free.

What is UX?

This is how I define “UX”

Fast and Free – Validating Concepts and Designs in Friendly-User Tests

UX/UI designers often get their most serious work done alone. So how to avoid designing garbage? Get a little help from your friends.

Thoughts on UX and Healthcare in California

My last visit out to California was interrupted by a trip to the hospital. My experience as a foreign “user” of emergency healthcare in California was definitely not frictionless.

Handling Multiple Modals on One Page with Vanilla JS

Here is a little JS snippet for opening and closing multiple modals on a page

Prioritizing User Stories and Features Using the Kano Model

How to prioritize what to build next?

Writing User Stories from Multiple Perspectives

The best way to communicate ideas in a language that anyone from stakeholder to designer to developer can understand.

Should You Buy an iPhone X?

So you've already got a newish iPhone that's working perfectly fine. But now the iPhone X is coming out. It's hot. It's sexy. And it's the most expensive iPhone to-date. But is it really worth the upgrade?.

Highlighting Rows in Google Sheets

How to highlight rows in Google Sheets on-the-fly with just one keystroke.

Making Presentation Slides Suck Less

A few tips on creating slides that are easier to create as well as much more understandable and enjoyable to view for the people in your audience.